ABSTRACT
This chapter explicates Radical Enactivism’s analytic roots, revealing its clarificatory ambitions and adoption of critical philosophical methods. It demonstrates why Radical Enactivists are proud to play the time-honored role of being good gadflies. Adopting such a stance is especially needed when investigating foundational issues in cognitive science. In playing that part, Radical Enactivists have sought to motivate acceptance of core enactivist tenets by famously challenging cornerstone cognitivist assumptions—namely, representationalism and computationalism. In the same vein, they have also devoted energy to critically analyzing, testing, and sometimes rejecting the positive proposals of other enactivists. This has earned Radical Enactivism a reputation for being an inherently negative program. By reviewing illustrative cases of theorizing in contemporary cognitive science, this chapter shows that Radical Enactivism’s critical philosophical spadework—its “being a good gadfly”—is essential for articulating new, more securely grounded frameworks of cognition that are valuable to the sciences of the mind.
